As business speed increases, people find themselves working on multiple projects and tasks at once. A result of this multitasking is that personal and team productivity can be negatively impacted as people change between related or unrelated tasks and try to prioritize their work-day.
Traditional task or “to-do” lists are limited in functionality. It may not be possible to relate listed tasks, for instance, to each other in any way beyond the use of nested folders. Apart from a user manually changing basic weighting attributes, there is no way to re-prioritize tasks.
Furthermore, communication systems, such as email communication systems, that may be involved in projects typically default to having information sorted with the most recent message at the top, by sender, or similar. A chronologically sorted inbox, for instance, is unlikely to align with a user's current-day desired workload prioritization. That can cause the user to become sidetracked and focus on items that may not be urgent in terms of priority, simply because those items are most visible based on the inbox's display of most recently receive messages.
With the prevalence of touch and gesture-enabled computer interfaces, a more natural way is desired for interacting with software; one that aligns the user interface to work the way humans do, rather than the reverse.